Edward SnowdenTalks Alien Communications With Neil deGrasse Tyson

An anonymous reader writes: Edward Snowden, the former contractor who leaked National Security Agency secrets publicly in 2013, is now getting attention for an odd subject: aliens. In a podcast interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Snowden suggested that alien communications might be encrypted so well that humans trying to eavesdrop on extraterrestrials would have no idea they were hearing anything but noise. There's only a small window in the development of communication in which unencrypted messages are the norm, Snowden said.

Comments

Maybe they don't even use RF

[Spy Handler]

All we know is radio, and listening with radio telescopes has yielded nothing. What if they use neutrinos or some other weird method that we don't know of?

Re:Maybe they don't even use RF

[RubberDogBone]

Or maybe they don't use radio the way we do. We've got a whole planet here full of millions of life forms and only one of them ever discovered and harnessed radio, and then only very recently. So it appears life doesn't need radio to thrive.

Humans use it because we have a need to tell our old campfire stories at a distance, and because we like to or need to talk to each other. There is no reason to suspect another species would have these same needs. None of our nearly identical genetic cousins have these needs and they're 99% the same as us. What would aliens, nothing like us, do? Well probably not what we do.

So basically, SETI makes some big assumptions that aliens would be using radio the same way we do and there is just no logical basis for that assumption.

Snowden's theory is pointless as well because there is no way to prove or disprove it. If the aliens are encrypting we may not be able to detect it. And if we can't detect it, we can't say it's there or not. So Snowden is automatically right so long as no signal in the clear is detected. Heck he's automatically right for any signal unless it happens to be in some goofball human code format like ROT13 or some such thing AND we can run the right decoder on it to get the latest Zeta Reticuli warez or b(.)_(.)bz

Re:Maybe they don't even use RF

[penguinoid]

Thing is, high entropy electromagnetic communications would be indistinguishable from noise -- and even if it weren't, it would be hard to compete with the ridiculously powerful noise of their star. Since entropy is approximately the same thing as information, we should expect to see nothing but noise even if we got a perfect noise-free replica of their communication. It'll only get worse -- higher entropy and higher directionality -- as the technological level improves.

Only way we're finding aliens is if they're also doing a SETI program and use radio waves to do so.

Encrypted is still not natural

[mbone]

I think he is confusing encryption and steganography. Encrypted signals will still require framing, will still be likely to be bandwidth limited, and so will not appear truly natural, even if we can never break the code. As the Brits found through traffic analysis in World War II, you can learn a lot from observing alien communications, even if you never decode a single word.

Re:There's two options

[Deadstick]

another mutual friend where he attempted to play the "i'm superior to you" card by switching into talking Russian.

I had a college French course circa 1961 with a prof who was convinced his shit smelled rosy, because -- of all the silly-ass reasons -- he could also speak Spanish. One day we were translating text from a French novel into English -- one of the simplest possible exercises in a foreign-language course -- and he turned to a student who was a recent refugee from Cuba. He said "Senor Hernandez, would you please translate the next paragraph into (visibly puffing himself up) "any language you please?"

The guy came back at him in Japanese.